A frozen creek where we stopped for lunch. Did I mention it was cold?

D´ya like dags?

More photo-related shenanigans. I´m not too sure where the dog came from, but he was duly conscripted by some of our fellow travelers.

Trick photography

One of the pastimes when in the middle of 12,000 square kilometres of featureless whiteness is to take trick photos. I´m not going to post those as they are kind of cheesy and mostly on other peoples cameras, but here are a few shots of salt-induced antics. For example my brother and I jumping off piles of salt. Well, I jumped; Andrew more... stepped. But at least I got him to do it. If we look a bit rugged up, it´s because this place is one of the most bitterly cold I´ve been in. One of the drivers of another tour indicated that it was 8 below and with wind chill -30 degrees celcius. I´m a little sceptical of that, but I will say it was a bit chilly.

And this is me proving that shadows ruin trick photography, but also that the first jump wasn´t a fluke.

They´re flat... and salty!

That´s right kids. They´re salt flats.

This is another of those pictures-do-the-talking situations, but by way of a general description, I do have a few things to say about the three days spent doing the Salar de Uyuni and surrounds tour. Like that if I was wanting to film a movie about another planet somewhere, this would be the first place (on Earth of course) that I would look for scenery to shoot in. Honest to goodness, this is the weirdest place I´ve seen in the world. From endless-seeming white expanses of salt to strange wind-sculpted rocks to geysers spewing pungent gases, this place has everything you need for the Mars Attacks! sequel we are all waiting eagerly for.

Sunrise, sunset

Actually, they´re both of the sunrise - over the pampas in Bolivia. I´m pretty happy with them, but then I´d want to be given how early we were tramping through swamp for the opportunity to take them.

More wildlife...

Here are some interesting specimen that found themselves up to thigh-deep in swamp for about 6 hours on the second day of our trip. The aim of the game was to find an anaconda (yes, one of the snakes which grow up to 12 metres long and eat choked alligator for breakfast). Unfortunately they were staying out of sight due to the lack of sun, but our Steve (Sabino is his real name) was determined to find one. In the end we gave up and headed back to camp exhausted.

The swamp is called the pampas by locals and, particularly along the river, is absolutely teeming with life. Birds, monkeys, capybaras (the largest rodents in the world), alligators, they larger cousins the cayman, turtles, river dolphins and snakes live here in almost ludicrous abundance. Most of these exist on the fish found in the river, of which there are a large variety including the infamous piranhas (see photo of fellow tour members with catch) and a fish with an interesting and rather Darwin-Award-winning trait of leaping out of the water and into passing boats, generally aiming at one of the occupants. My brother got hit square in the chest no less than three times, and I was lucky enough to have one deflect off the passenger in front of me into my face.

The boat itself was really the seventh member of our little group, it having a character entirely of its own. How we managed to get all of our packs plus supplies of the river on the three hour long cruise upriver was nothing short of a small miracle. This was not the first seeming impossibility witnessed - for my money, watching five-foot-nothing Sabino carry three heavy packs while walking along the edge of the boat is right up there with any biblical marvel you care to point at. In the end, the boat was pretty good most of the time, working as a great transport and at one point an excellent diving board. Only one incident panned out as it had threatened to - and of course on this occasion is was me who was tipped, camera and all, into the river. Luckily after drying out, the thing still works - just another on the long list of maltreatments that it has received from me.

Just some of the wildlife seen on the three day river and wetlands tour out of Rurrenbaque. The alligator you see here is one of hundreds that we saw basking on the bank of the river. We got so close up to some of these that we could have reached out and touched them if we were completely crazy. Which, by the by, our guide certifiably was; amongst many other acts of insanity, his antics included chasing a deadly cobra through the grass and catching it by the tail, jumping out of the boat to antagonise an alligator by repeatedly slapping it on the head and chin and calling us all "siñoritas" whenever we expressed any reluctance to, say, swim in the same river we had the day before caught around thirty piranhas out of.

Of course, we ended up going swimming. Piranhas and alligators are one thing, being called a girl is entirely another.

To the deep, dark Amazon basin...

When we booked a flight to Rurrenbaque in the Bolivian Amazon on a local carrier, my private hope was to be wedged between a goat and a crate of chickens in the cargo hold of a rusting DC3. This was dashed when we found ourselves shuttled in comfort across the Andes (spectacular - on one side the mountains give onto dry, dusty plains, on the other lush jungle climbs halfway up to the snowline) in a neat little Boeing twin turbo-prop. We DID get to land on a strip of grass cut out of the jungle though, which at least lent some South-American-adventure feel to the experience.

Safe as a Bolivian barge

The road to La Paz was our first experience of the Bolivian bus services - and their interesting method of crossing large bodies of water. Seeing our bus cruising across on these fairly shifty-looking barges was one of the more surreal moments of the trip so far.

Popcorn, anyone?

They do things big in Copacabana. I´d love to see the coke that goes with this...
Copacabana in Bolivia is the closest thing you´ll get to a beachside resort at 4000 metres above sea level. And you wouldn´t believe the prices if I told them to you. So I won´t.

A final fling in Peru

The last experience in Peru was another of those random, brilliant things which just seem to happen when travelling. The guide who had organised the trip to the islands (and incidentally also shown us a great place for dinner and taken us out to the local basketball final) had a friend, a fellow guide, who was keen on trialling a mountain bike trail that he was wanting to promote to tourists. We were the lucky guinea pigs to be taken for a free tour... This shot is after six hours of pretty gruelling riding around the Lake Titicaca area around Puno.

One of the best things about this was how we were shown the lives of the locals in a way that it is very difficult to experience normally I imagine. We visited quite isolated villages and stopped off at a farm which existed in much the same fashion I imagine it would have 400 years ago - no electricity, gas, or water, all the food prepared from the farm. We were even invited into the sleeping chamber of the family, where stuffed animals hung from the roof as charms.

The high life

Lake Titicaca, the claim to fame of which is to be the highest navigable lake in the world, sometimes has a positively Mediterranean feel - it would be easy to mistake it if not for the surrounding snowcaps and danger of altitude sickness.

All aboard

Don´t tap the glass

The floating islands of the Uros people on Lake Titicaca are still inhabited today by the ancestors of the same people who created them to escape their more warlike neighbours, such as the Incas. Until as recently as just thirty years ago, they did not even understand the idea of currency, their way of life was so untouched. Nowadays, the islands that visitors see (only around 25% of them) are almost zoo like in the way tourists are shipped out to them to watch a few simple demonstrations of the way the villagers live, and then invited to "visit the gift shop" and to take a ride on the reed boats (virtually everything is constructed from the reeds on which they live).

Condors ahoy!

After more than half an hour of vainly peering into the sky above and the canyon below, it seemed as if we would be amongst the unlucky groups that don´t see the condors in flight over the Colca river. Happily, we were proven wrong, and in spectacular fashion. Over twenty of the huge birds (the heaviest in the sky, with wingspans up to three metres) put on an aerial show for us, flying in pairs and threes, as close as five metres above our heads.

What do you call a baby llama?

On the road again

The next move was a trip from Arequipa to the Cañon de Colca, with the main goal to see the condors that fly over this, the second deepest canyon in the world. What was fortunate, and at times seems to be able to make or break these experiences, was that we had a great group of people in the van that we were in for two days, and time flew.

The new world

This is a big part of what made Arequipa so great.

The above is one of the cooks at Soncollay, a restaurant just off the central plaza. Walking into this restaurant, which was recommended by another traveler, we though we were just going to grab some dinner. I walked out more than four hours later after an experience I´ll never forget. The restaurant is run by head chef, Walter Buscamente, who has spent 30 years studying the origins of the human race and the links between languages across the world. A speaker of the native Quechuan language, the theories he has cooked up in his kitchen are more than enough to keep you occupied, never mind the delicious food he prepares with his unique cooking style (ultra-simple cooking on volcanic rocks, which are brought sizzling to the table).

It´s a keeper

The town of Arequipa in Peru was one of those surprise places that ends up pulling you in for a lot longer than you anticipate. This shot is of the interior of the monastery there, or nunnery more accurately, which is absolutely huge, taking up several city blocks. The colours represent different sections of the complex; one might be the area housing the novices, another where the mother superior resided. The effect is that the colours of the stucco walls contrast against each other and provide an amazing backdrop for the various courtyards and gardens throughout the place.

It apparently also induces severe forgetfulness; I managed to leave my camera in the very monastic toilets they had there (actually some of the better ones I had the pleasure of visiting in Peru) for around three hours. It was a very relieved and fairly sheepish yours truly who managed to claim it from the front office by sprinting back just before closing time.

One interesting thing to note about this shot is that it shows stairs which actually appear to go somewhere - the great majority of the flights here terminated, bizarrely enough, in a two or three metre high wall. That didn´t really stop me climbing all of them - I think I may have a touch of the obsessive compulsive about me.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

A weaving demonstration in Cuzco. The weavers produce amazingly intricate geometrical patterns, and no matter how much I watched, I couldn´t for the life of me work out how they do it with such precision. I guess I´ll have to leave it to the experts, which these guys definitely are.

A desktop background by any other name

I will say the weather ended up turning it on with a mixture of clouds and sun providing some great light - this is the view on one side of the Macchu Picchu ridge.

David Attenborough´s Flight of the Llama

Gratuitous llama shot. They are left to graze very photogenically around Macchu Picchu - watch out, they spit.

Waiting for the Sun

In general, Macchu Picchu postcard shots get done to death, so rather than post the general scenic shot, I thought I´d post a few shots of the circumstances leading up to capturing it (which, admittedly, is of the most breathtaking vista combining natural beauty and human heritage that I have seen). Firstly, the the walk up to Macchu Picchu from the town of Agua Calientes, about an hour and a half straight down from the Inca site. I don´t have anything to post there as we did that in the dark in order to arrive at the gates for opening at 6:00.

And arrive we did, sweating profusely, to be greeted not only by the tour buses depositing their first loads, but also by the curious fact that you have to buy the pass into the site at the bottom of the mountain, which, owing to the fact that we had arrived at 10:00 the night previous, we had failed to do. Once it became apparent that there was a small, sweat-drenched mob forming who shared our situation, we brought our combined pressure to bear to convince the guards to let us in if we left money for a ticket and our passports.

Which leads me to the above photo. The ridge above Macchu Picchu, where the Inca trail nominally terminates, is the best platform for taking the aforementioned shot. I say nominally, as there has recently been a landslide on the ridge leading to the site, which has forced all trailers to head down to Agua Calientes, stay the night, and catch a bus up with everyone else - a small, somewhat selfish balm on the wound of missing out on the trail ourselves. At any rate, these shadowy figures are a few of several hundred eager photographers lining the ridge and terraces of Macchu Picchu and waiting for the mist to rise.

In the meantime, my brother and I kept ourselves occupied, also patiently waiting for the fog to clear and the light to hit just so...